Cancel culture has always existed

How it works and how we can put a stop to it

Cancel culture has always existed, in all times and places. We should be grateful that it was, generally speaking, even more brutal and unforgiving in the past than it is today.

Being a publicly facing thinker that challenges ideas that are sacred to powerful factions in society has always been dangerous.

The sacred ideas of powerful factions are "mental blueprints" by which these factions hope to organize the activity of humans in society. The widespread adoption of these blueprints--by most or all of society--is hoped by these factions to lead to their preferred form of human social organization.

This preferred form of social organization is believed by these factions to lead to the best version of the "good life" for humans. That is why these factions believe that these ideas--the blueprints--are sacred: they believe that their ideas will lead to humans living in the best way that humans can live.

I use the word sacred for a reason. Sacred implies a conviction of belief that is of a religious kind.

Challenging such ideas publicly therefore entails challenging a powerful faction's deeply held beliefs about the way the world should be run and the way humans should live. It risks fewer people adopting these ideas, and therefore the desired way of life coming into existence. This is very threatening to people in these powerful factions, because again, these ideas are sacred and are being challenged.

People belonging to such factions have three basic ways of responding to such a challenge:

1. to believe that the challenger is bad, i.e., that the challenger wants to undermine human wellbeing, or is at least indifferent to human wellbeing, e.g., sadism, psychopathy;

2. to believe that the challenger is psychologically unwell, i.e., that certain psychological defects lead the challenger to question obvious "truths", such as a pathological desire to destroy, a hunger for attention, or a misplaced search for meaning, e.g., resentment, narcissism, existential malaise;

3. to believe that the challenger is ignorant, i.e., that the challenger does not understand why he is wrong because he lacks the mental capacity.

Barring some major personal crisis or life-changing experience of their own, people belonging to such powerful factions will almost never seriously consider, even for a moment, that their sacred beliefs are the ones that might be wrong.

After all, they are sacred.

Rather, they will project their sense of being ill at ease onto the challenger in one or more of the above three ways. They will conclude that something is wrong with the challenger rather than consider that something might be wrong with their own beliefs.

Highly intelligent people can easily discern who other highly intelligent people are, and so they will quickly rule out #3 for highly intelligent challengers.

But highly intelligent people are also just as motivated to maintain their sacred beliefs as anyone else, so they will conclude that the challenger is either bad or unwell, or both, and they will elaborate highly complex rationalizations for why this is the case. They will draw from the scantest evidence to make this judgment, for the purpose is not to find the truth, but to maintain one’s beliefs. They will be joined by less intelligent members of the faction, who will maintain that the challenger is ignorant.

Low-status, unscrupulous, and/or otherwise ambitious members of such a faction will make their contribution by fabricating evidence or leveling false accusations to satisfy the desire for all three forms of rationalization, which helps the community feel less uneasy and more resolved in extirpating the offender. Miletus and Anytus’s accusations of Socrates fit this mold, as did the accusations leveled against Anaxagoras, as did those against Alcibiades. Accusations against Phidias and Aristotle also fit. As did the slander against Pythagoras. Etc.

Historically, the outcome of this process has been exile or execution. We still have some form of exile in cancellations today, which involves losing a job, which in some ways is reminiscent of ancient exiles, since one has been removed from one’s customary community. But certainly, we do not often have executions, although some kinds of assassinations may be somewhat analogous, e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are some mitigating factors that have been able to neutralize or arrest the above process that have been present throughout history.

One is the decentralization of authority. The rapid progress made in Classical Greek civilization could in part be attributed to the lack of centralized authority. If a controversial thinker was unpopular in one place, he could move and continue work and spreading his ideas elsewhere.

It may be said that the emergence of social media resembles this decentralization best, but it is not a sufficient solution, as we shall see in a moment.

Another mitigating factor is the appropriate application of checks and balances and of due process. This is a good start, but it requires respect for these processes, which in America means respect for the constitution. If a sufficient number of powerful people involved do not have any respect for the law, the law will have no bearing, and the problem will get worse despite the law.

Another mitigating factor is a powerful patron or supporting institution. Patrons are indeed very important for supporting and protecting a thinker or artist’s output, but the existence of such patronage is very inconsistent over time.

Institutions like universities were envisioned to supplant the patron, but American universities in many fields are no longer places for the expression of academic freedom and the development of new ideas as they once were.

This brings us back to social media. American universities are no longer bastions of academic freedom—quite the reverse—because of the way social media mobs interact with university administration. Social media mobs are dehumanization and defamation machines. They produce highly charged, emotionally framed, apocalyptic, untruthful perspectives on reality. When these go viral, university administrators are faced with a choice.

Most university administrators are not academics or scientists and have goals and perspectives quite at odds with the goals of academics and scientists. Furthermore, university administrators almost universally achieve their positions by being uncontroversial—that is, by doing the exact opposite of what those expressing controversial ideas are doing. Not only will university administrators tend to regard the perspectives and speech of controversial scientists and thinkers judgmentally, university administrators themselves hate controversy, which is why they have so often been uncontroversial in the first place. The outcome will be that administrators will want to do anything to get rid of the problem, which includes steamrolling due process, violating the law, etc.

This is why social media is also not the solution to the academic freedom problem. The issue with social media is that it is fundamentally populist. It thrives on hysterical mobs. These mobs were given unprecedented cancelation power with the advent of social media.

Furthermore, to play the social media game long-term and make a living requires either pandering to the mob or being genuinely populist. But if the problem is partly populism itself—the will of the people being too easily expressed and turned into action, leading to the cancellation of anyone with public and unorthodox views, in turn silencing everyone else who might have an opinion—then while social media can provide some decentralization that is useful, we also need measures that fundamentally counter and buffer the power of social media, not lean into it. We need not populist thinking but anti-populist thinking that insulates thinkers from the bloodthirsty mob.

Because not every thinker is populist, nor can many kinds of thinking or science be monetized easily. If we do not build our institutions to support these kinds of individuals, then the price to our civilization will be extremely high indeed.

One simple solution is a new kind of academic institution that is run by actively publishing academics and scientists, not by administrators—and which is committed to academic freedom at all costs. It’s possible that such institutions would have to be very small and that many legal and financial barriers would exist to their foundation. But if we defunded a lot of the universities, and many certainly have become monstrosities that do more harm to society than good, we could use some of that money for these new kinds of institutions. It is possible that we could create a renaissance in American thought and science, but we must design these institutions around solving the social media and bureaucracy problems, which the hopelessly bloated modern university is neither willing nor capable of doing.

It is time to start over. It is the only way.